June 15, 2016

Advertising

Someone approached me at a recent conference to ask if I was available for hire and, in the course of the conversation, pointed out that he hadn’t really been certain whether or not it was possible to hire me for consultancy work. This made me realise that I don’t advertise very much, I usually forget to remind people that I can be hired, and I hardly ever remember to hand out (or even have available) business cards at the end of the presentations I give.

I am, however, available to do trouble-shooting, education, reviews, or design almost any time, anywhere, and at short notice. My speciality, though is solving performance problems quickly, and there are times when I find it agonising to watch the slow progression of question and (failure to) answer on OTN taking days, or even weeks, to get to a solution that was “obvious” from the original question and needed only a couple of hours to check and implement.

I can be hired for a couple of hours, a couple of days, or a couple of weeks. The one thing I don’t do is sign up to being on-site daily for months on end: it wouldn’t be a cost-effective use of your money (or, probably, an interesting use of my time), but if you wanted to do something like reserve every second Monday of the month for six months or twenty days of my time over the next year you wouldn’t be the first client to come to that type of arrangement.

If you’re really unlucky you might have to wait two weeks before I can get on your case (Open World, the UKOUG annual conference, and the family holiday can make timetabling a little awkward), but if you have a P/O, a description of the problem and requirements, and the authority to get me onto your system I can often start work within 48 hours (and finish within 72) – and if I think I can’t get the job done in the time you want to pay for I’ll tell you up front.

If I have to be on-site – and some of the projects I have helped with were very strict about security and access – I can travel almost anywhere in the world provided there are no visa or taxation problems to deal with (I’ve let my O-1 visa lapse, by the way, so anything in the USA will have to be handled from the UK); but if you only want a couple of hours of my time that will have to be over the Internet.

I charge £250.00 per hour or £1,700 per day, plus VAT (sales tax) where relevant. Travel and accommodation will be billed back at cost, and in extreme cases I may charge for some time spent on long-haul flights.

If the problem is interesting you’ll probably get some free time on top of the contracted time but that means I’ll probably want to write about the issue (using a suitably camouflaged model of the problem, of course).